Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can

MP, set in an asteroid belt, you start in a small pod with limited resources you have to make you way around the belt to various abandoned space stations, derelict ships, asteroid belts etc collecting O2, propellent, gear, food and water and upgrading parts in your craft adding sensors, thrusters, weapons systems.

The combat and movement should be very cat and mouse stealth based, you have ECM, IR, UV, Active/Passive radar systems for sensing and different gear on your ship should generate signatures when used, for instance a weapons system might increase your heat signature when fired or when you use thrusters to adjust velocity.

I'd like to get a feeling similar to the space combat in the book Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds. Where you're holding back that 1 salvaged IR missile or those last few rounds of gatling cannon for the exact right moment when the other ship comes out from the asteroid's shadow and the light makes it targetable.

I'd imagine there would be rogue AI in the place of zombies, active minefields, sentries, turrets etc to complicate things.

Once LT MP is up and running, how would you guys feel about an LT Battle Royale, throw 2-1000 people in a finite space, and the systems begin to disappear until there is one left, and then the survivors fight to the last

Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can

So perhaps at the smallest: 10 people, 6 systems (1 hub and 5 peripherals), 2 players spawn in each peripheral and 2 npc executives in the hub, after ~3 hours, the peripherals collapse. The remaining players and their npc assets are confined to a single system which remains until only 1 player is left.

At a medium scale, a couple dozen systems in a hub and spoke pattern, again 2 players spawn per system in the spokes and several npcs spawn in the hub. In this, the spokes begin to collapse at 1 hour in, and every 20 minutes, a single random spoke system collapses until only the hub is left.

At a large scale, the hub consists of a dozen systems, and are under the control of 2-4 well established npc factions hostile to the humans and maybe friendly/hostile with each other... around 100 spoke systems branch off from these, and again each spoke systems spawns 2 players, however the humans have no chance to beat the npc factions individually and must team up with each other to beat the npcs before the spokes collapse. The spokes begin to collapse an hour in, and then like before a random spoke system collapses every 20 minutes. The hub systems will remain stable until the last npc faction falls, and then they too will collapse until there is only 1 player or 1 system.

Then there could also be multi-week matches, where the spokes last longer, perhaps 1 systems disappears every 6 hours of real time.

Given the procedural nature of LT, we could make size, time, and other settings easily manipulated variables and discover through testing which most people enjoy, and those the rest enjoy most

Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can

I'm now imagining a humorous situation in which there's a three way battle at the end between two players and an NPC who is significantly stronger. Suddenly both of the players are killed in quick succession by the NPC, player 2 surviving just a second longer. Suddenly everyone get's the "Player 2 has Won" message as the player ships continue to explode in the background.

A life well lived only happens once.Seems deep until you think about it.

Technically that would be a win, and I also think it would be great fun... That your win just might mean that you lost last, would be great to watch on twitch

Additionally, I thought about an interesting multistage 1v1 death match:

You have an A to Z straight line of systems, the 2 players start at A and Z. In Stage 1, they develop and expand towards each other as rapidly as possible until all systems are occupied.
Stage 2 begins once all systems are claimed by 1 side or the other, whereby a White Hole forms in systems A and Z, and starts pouring resources ex nihilo into both sides. Here players must create a multisystem highway to deliver those resources to the front line and try to squeeze out the enemy. However, the balance of White hole resources favors the player with fewer occupied systems, the fewer systems they have, the more resources come pouring out of their white hole.
Stage 3 begins when one side is squeezed into very few systems; the White hole starts putting out so much energy and resources, the player has to harness this power and weaponize their white hole, turning former warp lanes into gigantic beam cannons, juggling patching up increasing numbers of spacetime rifts and capturing the raw energy and lobbing it as bombs towards the enemy before it explodes on them. Ideally this all builds up towards an epic final battle as one system combines the resources of all but 1 system vs a single system on the verge of blowing itself up with the amount of raw energy pouring into it.

Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can

Steal away, all my ideas are Creative Commons non-commercial, I just want a cut if you go and make some shekels so I can quit my day job and do this all day every day

Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can